Unreal Engine 4.16 now available

New features include animation and rendering, with full support for Nintendo Switch

Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 4.16 and the new version has significant improvements to animation and rendering, as well as performance improvements for mobile and console platforms.

One new feature is that of volumetric fog, which enables realistic fog and smoke effects with consistent lighting even at large scale.

New Animation Modifiers now provide greater control of the flow of character movement with the new spline IK solver and an updated Pose Driver with new lightweight rigid body and low-level cloth simulation tools.

From being experimental in UE4.15, support for the Nintendo Switch is now a full feature with 4.16. Epic Games has teamed up with Nintendo to release the full UE4 source code for Nintendo Switch to approved developers for free.

Physically-realistic bloom post-process effects can now be created with the new image-based (FFT) convolution feature Epic developed during the making of “The Human Race” collaboration with Chevrolet. FFT Bloom empowers artists to use custom bloom kernel shapes with complete control to match desired results.

Along with the hundreds of new updates from Epic, more than 160 improvements submitted by the Unreal Engine developer Github community are shipping with today’s 4.16 release.